Learning Mobile Development

Mobile App Refactoring Initiative by Slack

A summary of how Slack stabilized, modularized, and modernized its mobile application code base

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

Recently, Slack, a popular messaging software company shares their insight on how they improve their legacy mobile code base in a 30-minute long write-up. An interesting read.

• Stabilize the mobile code base — 16-minute reads
• Modularize the mobile code base — 13-minute reads
• Modernize the mobile code base — 13-minute reads

I’m summarizing my findings in this 8-minute read as below

Why need a major code base improvement?

The code has been there since 2015 (Android) and 2013 (iOS). At the time the team looks into improving the code (in 2020), it has been 5 years (Android) and 7 years (iOS). A major overhaul is needed because

• the code stays in monolith mostly, with feature set grew exponentially as well as team, and ways of working are not scaling
• it now has widespread inconsistency and outdated patterns across the code base, with the lack of separation of concerns
• newer technologies have emerged…